This is the second book in the series of the Karen Pirie series after The Distant Echo, and this confused me a little as, I must admit, I didn’t really remember Karen Pirie from The Distant Echo. But I like her and look forward to reading other books in this series – so, this is a cold case story following two plotlines. First, the disappearance of a miner during the 80s miner strikes – the man was believed to have become a scab, but now, many years later, it turns out he’d disappeared. Then there is the botched kidnapping of a millionaire’s daughter and grandson from around the same time. In the cash handover, the daughter was accidentally shot and killed and the grandson has never been found. Can Pirie solve these?

Of course. But how? I like the way the book jumps from character to character, from plot to plot, even when sometimes it took me a moment to catch up. Still, McDermid tells a good story, pacey and mostly plausible. But the key thing for me is that even when I think I’ve picked the twist or I know what happens next, I can still be surprised.